Cheshire-born Mike Burgess, 50, was working as a banker in London but opted for a career change when he moved to the US with his American wife in 2010. He now owns and runs thePure Pasty Company in Vienna, Virginia.

What prompted you to move to America?

I was born and brought up in Nantwich in Cheshire and then went to work for HSBC, so I spent a large amount of time living and working in Sheffield. I met the American girl who was to become my wife while on an HSBC trip out in South Africa. She was working for the UN peace-keeping team in the Congo.

We stayed in touch and ended up seeing each other, so she moved over to the UK. HSBC moved me down to London and I worked in Canary Wharf for five years. After that, we decided to emigrate to America. My wife always had it in mind that she would want to move back to the States. She wanted to live close to her mum when she had children.

Where did the idea for the shop come from?

I’d always had this fantastic idea of changing career completely and opening up this pasty shop in America where they have very, very few pasty shops. It was coincidental, really. During the years I’d spent working in Sheffield, I used to be responsible for organising a big snowboarding trip every year and we used to come out to the Rockies. It was during that period that I was always saying to people, “If you want to come and live the life here, you wouldn’t be able to get pasties! They’d go down fantastically in ski resorts!” So that’s where the idea actually sparked from.

At the same time, of course, in the UK you’ve got all those pasty companies like the West Cornwall Company that were making the pasty a really popular product. I had this idea you could take that concept that was really growing in the UK and you could stick it in some American ski resorts. But at first my wife said, “Absolutely not, there’s a recession on and we’re not taking any risks.”

How did you choose your location?

My wife wanted to go back to where she was born in the Washington DC area as she was confident she could find a job there, so we lived with the mother-in-law for 18 months. I was planning on opening my shop anyway, so before we arrived I started putting all the processes in motion. But she was probably right that to do it in a ski resort would have been a bridge too far.

Where we’re located at the moment is just outside Washington DC in a little town called Vienna. When it came down to it, there weren’t that many available options for my business and I was really lucky that the Vienna location came up. It’s not perfect: we’re set back from the main street, we’re not easily visible, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons. You could spend years and years looking for the perfect place. The main thing is we needed to be somewhere my wife would have easy access into the centre of DC.

I’d definitely recommend this area. Vienna’s fantastic, it’s been really good to me. I really like the area and I love the people. Virginia itself is a gorgeous spot in the world. I wish it wasn’t so hot and sweaty in the summer – no matter how much you think you like heat you would not like summer here – but I’ve been very happy here.

How did you set about opening up your business?

It is quite daunting at first. It’s one of those things you just have to take it one step of a time. Sometimes things seen insurmountable because there’s a lot of them, but you just have to prioritise it and take it on one at a time. I don’t think the legal side of it is that different from one country to the next. Wherever you’re doing it you’re going to have a lot to learn. What you need to do is talk to the right people to find out what boxes need to be ticked. In my case I was lucky: my personal relationship manager at HSBC put me in touch with a really good CPA [certified public accountant] and my CPA sorted out all of my registrations for me, so I didn’t even need to employ a business lawyer.

All the information is available when you go looking for it. There’s lot of small business offices set up specifically to help you.

I was preparing to open this business for about 12 months before I left the UK. It always goes back to how good your preparation is. The whole process took about two years between deciding I was going to open the business and actually opening it. Doing it while moving countries obviously meant I needed extra time as I had to take more issues into account.

How did you set about drawing customers in?

I spent very little on advertising. My strategy was: a long time before I opened my doors I started up a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account, so I used all the usual social media marketing tools.

By the time the business actually opened up there were already quite a lot of people looking at me. Because I was doing something different, the local media were all very keen on taking a look. The Washington Post featured us within two weeks of opening the doors. The customer response we had to that article actually almost killed us; it swamped the place.

The biggest thing you’ve got to learn at that stage is you’ve got to get your customers coming back again and you’ve got to make sure that your production capacity meets demand. We got a lot of free publicity and then we tried to maintain that through email lists, a "pasty" newsletter where we tell people what our specials are and we’re always on Facebook and Twitter telling people what we’re doing, holding fundraisers and so on.

The area we’re in has a fantastic sense of community so we build on that by sponsoring school events, having Pure Pasty t-shirts at sporting matches and so on. NBC also featured us during the royal wedding; that came about because they were looking to feature British businesses at that time and one of our customers just sent them an email. The next thing I knew they were coming down to film the shop. That aired at about 6:40pm and the shop closes at seven anyway, but I thought “you know what, we’d better stock up for that last 20 minutes just in case,” so we made extra supplies. But even so we sold out straight away, people were just flocking to the shop; there were hundreds of them.

Any other advice for expats opening a business?

You’ve got to fly by the seat of your pants a little bit. Having said it’s all about planning and preparation, you can do a lot of that but it’s never going to go how you think it’s going to go, so you’re going to have to change and adjust and be ready for those situations.

Why do you think your business has been successful?

This area of north Virginia is the right place to do it with the market demographic here. The local American population here is very diverse. They’re all living here basically because they work in or around DC, so they’re working for government-contracted international companies. That means they have a great sense of international awareness and a lot of them are very Anglophile. A lot of them have been educated in the UK, worked in the UK, spent time in the military in the UK, and there’s a lot of British expats in the area. They’re all very keen to dispel this myth that British food is terrible.

My customer demographic splits into two really: there’s the expat community, which is not only Brits but also Australians and South Africans and Kiwis. They all like pasties and pies. Then there’s the other half which is the local American population who are very Anglophile and very open-minded. They want to try something new and different and are very bored of their usual food line-up.

Over here they think they have a very diverse menu but they don’t. All the big American chains have very similar menus. So they find this new, different and attractive. It’s the only place you can get it. Also, we place a lot of emphasis on the quality of what we do, to match the kind of clientele that live in this area. People are looking for organic, local produce and that’s what we do with our pasties. We’re really trying to produce a super pasty! Something a bit above and beyond the nasty item that was found in a plastic bag on a petrol station shelf.

And then also the pasty is not exactly new to the US. Trying to regard America as one entity is always difficult because it’s such a huge country; it’s like trying to refer to everyone in Europe as the same. There’s so much diversity in the people here and Cornish immigrants have settled some of the northern US states. Anyone from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan was born and brought up on pasties and they will travel miles to get here for a pasty.

If I’d set up there, in the Upper Peninsula, I’d have been selling coal to Newcastle; my business probably wouldn’t have done so well.